All atwitter

Monday, December 8, 2008

I'm looking through this 1970 book about Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland by Ivan and Mary Volgyes, and it has a few neat soviet-era jokes worthy of reproducing:

Czech:Who are the slowest people on Earth? -- The Soviets. We asked them to move in their troops in 1938, but by the time they got here it was 1968!

Magyar: Stalin dies and goes to the gates of Heaven. St Peter meets him there and refuses him entrance. In a few days, as Peter is dozing off merrily in the sun, he hears an awful racket outside the gates. So he wakes up, opens the gates and observes a horde of little devils standing in front of the gates. "And what the hell are you guys doing here?", he asks. The answer -- "Us? We're the first refugees of the Stalinist Terror."

Friends

How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?" — was that it? — "I prefer men to cauliflowers" — was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished-how strange it was! — a few sayings like this about cabbages.